


I Can Show You the World

by Snickfic



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Kissing, Wooing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 21:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17794682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Princess Shuri is sitting cross-legged on the floor of Bucky's hut, doing something with a hologram projected from her wrist. “Finally,” she says when his shadow falls across her. “I’ve been waiting here for an hour.”





	I Can Show You the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> Sneaking this in just a little after the wire. I've been wanting to write these two for a while. I hope you enjoy. :) I've marked this as underage; I figure Shuri is about seventeen here, although the movies are ambiguous.

People bring Bucky gifts. He comes back from a swim or an afternoon with the goatherds to find things piled inside his doorway, out of the sun: fruit and interesting rocks, brilliant jungle blooms, a staff he starts practicing with. He feels hopelessly awkward at it, perpetually off-balance, but if someone in Wakanda believes he can make some use of it one-handed, he might as well try.

One afternoon he returns to his hut, sweaty and languid in the heat, and finds something else. His first thought is that some kid left their marble lying around. It’s spherical and just the size of one his old cat’s-eye boulders. He’s never seen anyone play marbles here, though—or anywhere else, for at least half a century—and it’s painted a matte black. He eyes it distrustfully, walks carefully around it, and lies on his pallet for a nap.

It’s still there when he wakes up. He eats a mango and a handful of nuts and doesn’t look at the thing at all, except out of the corner of his eye, where it sucks up all his attention like a black hole. 

He gives up eventually. He pokes at it with his staff, and when it doesn’t explode, he picks it up. It’s heavy and sits comfortably in his hand. He taps it with a fingernail. He turns it over, inspecting the airtight seams, until he finds an impression the size of his pinky finger. He looks at that for a long time.

_What the hell_ , he thinks, and presses it.

Sunrise comes to his hut, soft and glowing. But this isn’t the sunrise he sees outside his door each morning, dulled by the heavy morning moisture. This is savannah in high summer. He recognizes the gum arabic trees. Kenya? He had a mission in Nairobi once, he thinks. The grass stretches out as far as he can see in every direction.

It’s twenty seconds before he realizes there’s music, too, rising as gradually as the African sun; another ten seconds to realize he recognizes it. It’s fucking Bing Crosby, crooning “Out of Nowhere.” 

“What the hell,” Bucky says blankly.

That must be some kind of signal, because Crosby fades out again. The next piece is orchestral, kind of soothing; something his dad would have liked. Lots of instruments. Off in the far distance of his hut, a glimpse of awkward motion resolves into a giraffe.

“Turn off,” Bucky says. The effect is instantantaneous, the sights and sounds all gone, leaving only his hut. “Turn on.” Slowly they fade back into view. 

Well, okay. “Thanks,” Bucky says, tentatively. The giraffe flicks an ear.

\--

The next time, it’s food, and it has company. Princess Shuri is sitting cross-legged on the floor of Bucky's hut, doing something with a hologram projected from her wrist. “Finally,” she says when his shadow falls across her. “I’ve been waiting here for an hour.”

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Bucky says, mystified. He leans his staff against the wall inside the door. His hair swings in his face, damp with sweat. There’s a limit to how much he can tame it one-handed.

“It’s all right,” Shuri says, very graciously. She lifts a colorful cloth, bound up and knotted at the top. “I brought you dinner.”

Bucky doesn’t feel particularly enlightened by this information. “Did you make it?”

“Please,” Shuri says, rolling her eyes, from which Bucky determines she didn’t. She looks at him expectantly, so he sits down on his pallet and works at the knot until it loosens. 

Inside the bundle there are boxes, and inside the boxes are, indeed, food: flatbread and lentil stew and cooked spinach. “Do you want some?” he asked, the politeness ingrained at some level deeper than Hydra ever managed to reach.

“I ate earlier,” Shuri says. So Bucky sits on the floor of his hut, with a clear sight line across the clearing, and eats dinner with a princess. He scoops some stew up with the flatbread, and Shuri says, “Did you like the gift I sent you?”

She’s messing around with her holograms again, not looking at him at all. “It’s pretty,” Bucky says. “I’m—not really sure what to do with it?”

“I’ll show you,” she says, as if she’d been waiting for him to say exactly that. “Where is it?”

He points her to the box in the corner of the hut. It’s not locked; everything in there is a gift from Wakanda anyway. Shuri comes back with the little black sphere, which she sets on the floor between them. “Birnin Zana,” she says. Now Bucky is sitting on a turfed roof, the city’s towers reaching for the sky around him. “The falls,” she says, and now they are perched on the edge of an abyss that water disappears into, endlessly. “Better than Google Street View,” Shuri says, grinning at Bucky, eyes bright with interest, and Bucky realizes—

Bucky knows that look. He knows it like he knows marbles and Dick Tracy gadgets: things from _before_. He saw it on ladies waiting for him to invite them home. 

But his home is just this hut now, and Shuri’s already in it. She invited herself. She’s still talking, blithely unaware of Bucky’s private revelations. “It’s got lots of places,” she says. “Paris. New York. The Grand Canyon. Just tell it what you want to see. I can add stuff too, if you think of something you want to look at.”

“I’m good for now,” Bucky mumbles.

She gives his shoulder a squeeze when she leaves. Ten minutes after she’s gone, he can still feel the press of her fingers on his skin.

\--

He plays with the thing, which he still doesn’t have a name for. He sits atop the Empire State Building at dawn and swelters under the Miami sun at midday. He counts the spires of Moscow as snow drifts down around him in fat, white flakes.

He’s been all those places—on a mission, or on the way to one—but he’s never visited the particular bluff in Montana the gadget shows him, overlooking a river edged with cottonwoods. He’s strolled through Leipzig a dozen times, or run, or driven, but never at Christmas, when the entire square glows golden on the snow.

\--

“You look hungry,” Shuri announces from the edge of Bucky’s pond. She’s got a basket with her this time.

They eat under the shade of the trees, just where the wiry grass meets the jungle. Bucky finds sandwiches in the basket. One of them has cured meat in it, salty, like salami. He digs a piece out to inspect. It looks like salami, too.

“It’s imported,” Shuri says.

“You bringing the whole world to me, huh?” Bucky says—not really even thinking, just letting his mouth move like it’s always been prone to. Well. _Always_ excepting a seventy-year gap in the middle.

“We have everything here,” she says. “Anything they can build, I can invent a better one.”

“Or you can import,” Bucky says.

She wrinkles her nose. “Or we can import.”

“Guess I’ll just stay, then,” he says, taking another bite of his sandwich. Only when he looks up does he finally cotton onto how intently Shuri’s looking at him. Belatedly, he wonders just what conversation they’ve been having.

“Good,” is all she says.

\--

One morning, Bucky wakes up to find his sphere has turned itself on. It’s shining a message on his wall in glowing blue letters: _Come to the lab._ In retrospect, he should have predicted that the sphere could do this, too. After he’s stared at it for a couple of moments, it starts to blink. “All right, all right,” he tells it, because now he has to assume that what he says gets relayed back, too. “I gotta eat first, you know.”

After he eats his stew, he treks down through the foothills to shining Birnin Zana. No one pays him much attention, which means they must already all know about the white man missing an arm who’s hiding in a clearing on the mountain. Perversely, this makes him feel even more conspicuous. He’s sweating from more than the heat when he arrives at the palace. The guards let him in without comment.

Bucky knows how to get to the lab, of course. He knows how to retrace every step he’s taken in Wakanda—and every step out of it, too. Seventy years of steps. Bucky takes a few more, up the spiral staircase, and there through the doorway is Shuri. She’s sitting down and peering at a screen, deaf to the world, utterly intent.

He wants to keep looking at her. The realization creeps over him like shadow creeping over his mountain at sunset. 

He shakes it off and knocks on the door frame. She turns and gives him one of those bright smiles she seems to have an endless supply of. “White Wolf,” she says. “Come in. How is your shoulder?”

Bucky shrugs said shoulder. “Same.”

She sits him on a chair and peers at his socket with what looked suspiciously like a flash light, but probably wasn’t. She mutters to herself for a while, makes notes on a tablet, peers some more. All that focus he was admiring twenty minutes ago is now focused on _him_. It shouldn’t matter; she’s scanning his socket with some kind of laser and has clearly forgotten he’s there at all. 

Heat prickles in his armpits. “So what’s this about?”

“I’m making you a better one,” Shuri explains absently.

“Oh.”

She tears her attention away from her work—from _him_ —to look him in the eye. “Unless you want the old arm back, but I thought—”

“No, I don’t—I’m fine now, you know? I don’t need another one.” He could’ve explained it to Steve, maybe, and Steve would get it. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. But Steve isn’t here, and Shuri’s still looking at Bucky with big, worried eyes. Bucky tries for a smile. “I’m getting pretty okay with that staff, you know.” 

She smiles back, bright as the sun. “You should show me.”

“Well, when I say okay, I mean I don’t drop it as much.”

“You should show me,” she repeats, eyes shining.

He ducks away from that gaze, much too late. “Sure,” he says.

\--

He’s not really surprised when she turns up at his hut, two evenings later. He walks out of the pond, stripped to the waist and soaking wet, and of course she’s there. She looks almost as flustered as he feels. She’s holding a basket again, and he says, “Is that dinner?”

Bucky wraps himself up in a robe and brings out a blanket, and they sit on it out in front of the hut, watching the sunset turn the mountain golden and eating meat and vegetables wrapped up in the sour flatbread.

Shuri doesn’t say much. That’s weird for her, at least outside the lab. It’s weird that he knows that, too. She’s wearing something fancy. It’s midnight blue, intricately embroidered in silver, tightly fitted on top and loose below her hips—good for sitting cross-legged on a picnic blanket. Her hair sparkles.

Bucky aches a little, looking at her. She catches his eye on her and offers him a secretive smile. “I brought wine,” she says.

“Princess—” he begins, but he doesn’t know how to continue. “Are you even old enough to drink that?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Just because I’m not _a hundred years old_ —”

“Shuri,” he tries again. “Whatever you’re going for here, it’s—it’s a bad idea. I’m a bad idea.” He fixes his gaze on his hands so he doesn’t have to see her looking disappointed or embarrassed or pissed. He’d rather she was pissed. 

She doesn’t say a word; he’s not sure she breathes. He’s not sure he does, either. Then there’s motion at the corner of his eye, and the next moment Shuri is straddling his lap and settling down into it. “I’m an excellent idea, though,” she says.

“You’re really not,” he tells her, just before she kisses him.

It’s not a good kiss. Before he has time to settle into it—even if he _were_ going to settle into it—she’s got her tongue his mouth, and there’s some slobber, and—

And her lips are so warm, and she’s got her fingers tangled in his hair, and he’s hungry, starving, so desperate for it that he forces himself to pull away. He stares at her as he raggedly tries to catch his breath. “You’ve never done this before, huh?” he gasps.

“Shut up,” she says, but she’s looking at him with concern. Apparently his face does what his words couldn’t, because after a moment she ducks her head and shifts off his lap. “I shouldn’t have done this. I’m sorry.”

He already misses her. When was the last time someone touched him? Someone that he liked? Steve, he supposes, that last hand-clasp before Bucky went under again. He thinks maybe he’s crying, and how fucking stupid is that? A _highly trained operative_ , that’s him.

Shuri’s reaching for the picnic basket, making her escape. Bucky says, “I don’t got a lot of friends, you know.”

She stills, her hand on the unopened bottle of wine.

“It’s you and Rogers, pretty much. Maybe a couple of the goatherds,” he admits. “Some of the kids that bring fruit by, but none of them know where I’m from or how many people I’ve killed, so it’s not really the same, I guess.”

She’s looking at him with those big dark eyes. It makes him want to go hide in his hut, maybe never come out again. The moment draws out. In the jungle, a parrot starts to squawk, making a truly unholy racket. It’s still squawking when Shuri leans over on one hand. Bucky sees her coming and doesn’t move as she presses one last kiss to his lips, close-mouthed and sweet.

Just as she pulls back, he catches her, resting his hand on her shoulder. The light has faded far enough that he can’t make out her expression anymore, only feel the tension under his palm and hear her shallow breaths. “It’s a bad idea,” he says again—a token protest. A confession.

She sighs as she kisses him again. It’s a little less wet this time. “You don’t gotta do all the kissing at once,” he says against her mouth. “You can take it slow.”

“Shut up,” she says, but she doesn’t try so hard to eat his entire mouth after that. 

He lets his hands fall to her sides, stroking along her ribs, catching his fingertips on her pretty embroidery. “You’re so warm,” he says. It sounds stupid out loud, but it’s true. Everywhere she touches him burns, like a fire he wants to fling himself into. His pulse is racing, and he’s hard, though that need feels distant right now, almost irrelevant. 

A stick snaps only a few dozen feet away. Bucky stills, listening for more. Night has fallen. “You walking back to the city in the dark?” he asks.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she says, like he’s said something stupid.

So they clear up the picnic and hide away in Bucky’s hut. They make out, sitting on his pallet, her fingers in his hair like she can’t get enough of it, his hands skimming over her arms and sides and shoulder blades. She’s so close, and she’s getting the hang of the kissing, and she smells of honey and one of the local flowers he hasn’t learned the name. 

She brushes a hand over his erection by accident. They both freeze. “I could do something about that,” she says, but it’s more of a question.

And yeah, he wants it, but—“Not tonight, eh?” He’s pretty sure she’s never even kissed someone before. To soften it, he adds, “I wanna see if you’re brother’s going to throw me out of the country first.”

“He won’t,” she says comfortably, pressing into his side. “I’ll tell him it was all my idea. He’ll believe me.”

“Yeah, that’ll help me a lot.”

She sniggers softly, and then it’s quiet for a while. They look out into the rectangular near-dark of his doorway. She feels really good, snuggled against him like that. A little weird, the ghost of a memory so old he can barely make out the shape of it anymore, but precious. He puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “Hey, what’s your favorite scene from your gadget?”

“You mean the holosophere?” she asks. He can hear the amusement in her voice.

“Sure. Why don’t you show me?”

She pitches her voice a little louder. “Night sky,” she says. At first there’s nothing, just the same black walls of his hut—he’s got a lantern that runs on an apparently endless battery, but he hasn’t turned it on. Then the darkness deepens into velvet. Stars brighten into view, hundreds upon hundreds of them. His whole hut is the sky.

It’s beautiful. Bucky’s mostly forgotten what that looks like. He’s forgotten a lot of things. “Thanks,” he says.

Her words hum against his shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

end


End file.
